Saturday, June 7, 2014

#onlyagoodguywithagun

Yesterday, I saw a kid, perhaps in his twenties, who wore a t-shirt that said "I like my guns the way Obama likes his voters - Undocumented".

Well, my first impulse was that I wanted to shoot him in the head.

Or at least call him a fucking idiot, but, nah, what would that have accomplished?

In 1975, two friends and my brother went wilderness camping in Idaho. We stopped at a bar/restaurant in Riggins, ID. When we walked in, all heads turned to look at us and talk stopped. It really was like the Wild West, and all that was missing was for a piano player to stop playing. Well, small town, and everyone was probably there for lunch so e=mc squared, strangers in town. They all checked us out, wrote us off as campers and went back to eating.

Interesting thing. We were all long hair and jeans and baseball caps and tennis shoes. And they were all cowboy boots and cowboy hats, or John Deere caps, and sidearm pistols, all of them what today would be called open carry.

And we Hoosier boys didn't think much of it, except for that fact that we stood out and probably should get some guns. One thing sure as hell didn't cross our minds was "Are we safe? Is there a spree killer here that's gonna blast us?"

So, what's happened since 1975? I think a lot of it has to do with the increasing militancy of the NRA. And now, they've created a monster. They wanted to look all reasonable and responsible, and instead, every dumbass who pulls this gunplay shit tars them with their own brush. Oh, boo-hoo, and but I don't how they will unpaint themselves out of this corner.

Especially considering their contention that only a good guy with a gun is so laughably proven wrong with each new incident. The tiny-brained dumbasses of the right wing press refuse to acknowledge the fact that most spree killers are either killed or disarmed by professional law enforcement agents, rather than wannabe Batman vigilantes. In fact, soon after the kid with pepper spray took down the Seattle shooter, the dipshits at the squamous skin cell network tried to spin a story of a deputy sheriff taking out some maniac into a #goodguywithagun story. I mean, the perps name was Marx, there on a drug related charge, so he had to be a leftist, correct? Oh, so sorry, right-wingers, he was one of yours.

The thing that worries me is now the rhetoric has shifted so that these creeps wish to paint any of their fellow Americans who disagrees with their brittle worldview as not really an American citizen. It's to the point where Rand Paul has to spread his legs for the Texas GOP (proving once again that the Senate, though not the oldest whorehouse in DC, is still the biggest) with a joke that was supposed to be funny, but still reflected an underlying and ongoing message that he (and other creeps) does not recognize certain of his fellow Americans as REAL Americans.

...and therefore (this coming from a guy who claims to respect the Constitution) do not enjoy the same constitutional rights as REAL Americans, which, you know, means when push comes to shove means Rand will probably shoot them.But you know what? Fuck Rand Paul and his allegedly unserious divisive comments, I'm thinking now about the Andy Griffith Show. Remember how Andy was a sheriff without a gun, and it was Barney Fife with his single bullet who was the object of ridicule? And actually it was only until the show had gone to color and jumped the shark that they brought up the whole sheriff without a gun angle anyway.Point being that there were firearms in the Mayberry courthouse tucked away in a gun cabinet, and Andy did occasionally pack heat, but for 99% of the problems he encountered, Sheriff Andy Taylor did not need to solve them with a gun! This whole 2A solution bullshit was crazy talk back then.Hell, he even got shot at by the likes of various mountain folk, and still didn't arm himself or shoot back because "didn't know it was me, and likely didn't mean it none".Or, as Andy put it in one episode: "When a man carries a gun all the time, the respect he's getting might really be fear. So I don't carry a gun, because I don't want the people of Mayberry to fear a gun. I'd rather they respect me".
Nowadays there are far too many pipsqueak Barney Fifes swaggering around in America, and not enough Andy Taylors.

2 comments:

When I was growing up, before Houston became such a cosmopolitan city, it was not unusual to see hunting rifles and shotguns on gun racks attached to the back window of truck cabs. But you know what we didn't see? These guys carrying their weapons inside restaurants or stores, wearing them like some sort of fashionable accessory.

Exactly, Gun Barbie Accessorizing is what we see today. When I was in that 1975 diner in Idaho? I think every single sidearm was a revolver. They hadn't been suckered into the full combat fashion stream yet, I guess, or just stuck with something reliable that would occasionally misfire, but never jam.

About Me

The term "random walk" is attributed to Karl Pearson, through a 1905 letter exchange in the journal Nature. It describes the path of a hypothetical drunkard. Since I hardly ever drink, I suppose that description fits me as well as any other. Other than that, I'm a well-muscled, good-looking, middle-aged, no-nonsense Northern Barbarian type that would just as soon put you to work as say "Hello" to you. So, Hello there! Now get back to work!